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I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.

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( Scroll down if you're not interested in DB2 ) This past week I've been updating our SQL Analysis code to cope with Unicode SQL statements. (If you bind a package or plan once you've gone to DB2 Version 8 New Function Mode the statement text is stored in the Catalog in Unicode.) These statements are in Unicode UTF-8 which is extremely similar to ASCII. So I snaffled some existing code of mine... [More]

As I said in this post I recently came across the need to handle Unicode when processing DB2 Accounting Trace (SMF 101). I was astonished not to have run into it before in all my many sets of customer data. So I had two things to do: Understand the circumstances under which it happens - which isn't just "be on Version 8 and it will happen automatically." and Figure out how to handle... [More]

In the distant past I've written about using DFSORT to parse XML. This post (and two follow-on posts) will describe
an experiment to make such processing much more robust. In this post I'll talk about what the problem I'm trying to solve is. And why. And a brief outline of my solution. About XML This isn't meant to be the most detailed description of XML, nor a complete list of where it's used. I... [More]

Thanks to Scott Drummond for reminding me of last Autumn's DFSORT Function PTFs - UK90025 and UK90026. They're mentioned in the preview for z/OS Release 13 so now is not such a bad time to be talking about them. So let me pick out a few highlights: Translation Between ASCII And EBCDIC, And To And From Hex and Binary For a long time DFSORT has been able to translate to upper case (TRAN=LTOU), to... [More]